NEWS

Global Warming May Expose Frozen Cold War-Era Hazardous Waste

Climate change is threatening to
expose hazardous biological, chemical and radioactive waste at an abandoned
Cold War-era base thought to be buried forever in the Greenland Ice Sheet, new
research has warned. Camp Century, a US military base built within the
Greenland ice sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the
feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War.
When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were
abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual
snowfall. "Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different
areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites," said
William Colgan, a climate and glacier scientist at York University in Canada.